“It’s the best all-nighter you’ll ever pull,” says cultural anthropologist and professor Ken Guest of the all-night bike tour he leads through Manhattan each spring as part of his CUNY Honors College course, “The Peopling of New York.” This year’s tour, held on May 4 and 5, was Guest’s fourth (“We were rained out three weeks in a row in 2002 and also rained out in 2005!” he remembers).

The tour offers vivid illustration of in-class work, which explores the role immigration and migration have played and continue to play in shaping the city’s identity. Topics include why people have been drawn to New York; the different ways that religion, culture, gender, race, and ethnicity have shaped the city’s population; and the impact of newcomers on urban culture, politics, and the economy. Guest’s own area of expertise is Chinese immigration. In 2003 he authored God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community, and he is currently at work on a textbook titled Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age (Norton).

This year’s tour began at Columbia University and proceeded at a leisurely pace south through Manhattan, with stops in various neighborhoods. “As you go south, you go back into time,” explains Guest. The group of 14 cyclists stopped at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Manhattan Valley, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Little Italy, Chinatown (where the group dined at Chinatown’s famous Wo Hop’s), Five Points, the African Burial Ground, City Hall, the World Trade Center site, Wall Street, the South Street Seaport, and the now-defunct Fulton Street Fish Market. A happy and bleary-eyed crew witnessed the sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge—exactly on schedule—at 5:51 am.

The idea of the tour was inspired by a similar tour Guest took as an undergraduate. “When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, Professor Kenneth Jackson led an all-night bike tour of New York. It was so memorable and so much fun.” Guest’s students are equally charmed by his tour. “The kids’ reactions have been fantastic,” says Guest. “It’s a big hit. It’s a thrilling experience to see New York City at night. You get a vastly different sense of the city and its life during these hours. The city’s surprisingly empty between midnight and 6; it’s a beautiful time. And what a perfect activity for getting students out of the classroom and into the city.”

—Diane Harrigan